Fiction
I don't know quite what to make of The Sweetness of Water, a novel by Nathan Harris. It's set in the post-Civil War South and it does provide insight into the tension in the region during that time, with many former slaveowners refusing to acknowledge that people were no longer property. The book opens with an older man, George Walker, who has just been told by his son's best friend (also his lover, we later find out) that his son Caleb was killed in action. To avoid telling his wife the bad news, George is out hunting for what sounds like a mythic beast when he finds two young freedmen, Landry and Prentiss, camping out on his land. Landry and Prentiss have nowhere to go, so George invites them to live in his barn. George has always been something of a lay-about but decides to hire Landry and Prentiss to help him work his land. Then Caleb shows up--not dead after all but ashamed of his cowardice in battle--and begins working together with Landry and Prentiss. The rest of the town of Old Ox, GA, does not approve of this arrangement, and things spiral out of control for individuals and the town. The Sweetness of Water provides some interesting insight into a slice of the post-war South, but I felt there were many questions left unanswered and the slice may be too narrow. Still, worth reading.
Reading Rest and Be Thankful by Emma Glass is a traumatic experience. The book describes a few days in the life of a pediatric nurse driven to utter exhaustion by long shifts caring for desperately ill babies and their parents and by the collapse of her relationship with her partner. The style wasn’t entirely to my liking—too many “dream sequences” and impressionistic passages featuring sentence fragments. Still, I was finding the description of her time at the hospital interesting until I got to the end and wanted to throw the iPad on which I was reading on the ground and stomp on it. I guess there’s a message—nurses are overworked, weary, and stressed and the care they provide suffers because of that—but it could have been conveyed without the horror of that ending.
The Candy House is something of a sequel to Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which followed a dizzying array of interrelated characters engaged in the music industry. Many of these characters reemerge, along with new characters, in The Candy House. With my flawed memory, I didn't remember much about the characters who make the leap from Goon Squad to Candy House--it didn't really matter (but it might have been better to stop trying to remember). Anyway, The Candy House looks at how people deal with a new technology, conceived by the brilliant Bix Bouton, which allows people to upload all of their memories to a collective archive, from which they can also access the memories of everyone else who is participating. The book opens with Bix, in a moment when he thinks he's had his last good idea but is then inspired to create the collective memory archive. What follows, as in Goon Squad, are chapters from different characters' perspectives, not presented chronologically or in a coherent plot--in fact, not always easily tied to the story you think Egan is telling about technology-- probably because Egan is actually telling a much broader story about the longing for connection, memory, pain, how life is changing. I felt confused a number of times while reading The Candy House but the confusion is part of the reading experience, which was complex and rewarding.
Several characters in The Candy House were, via various forms of memory, searching for their fathers, so it was interesting that the next book I picked up--Sankofa, by Chikbundu Onuzo--was all about the search for a missing father. Anna is a biracial British woman who, after her mother dies, discovers a diary written by her father in the few years he spent in the UK before returning to his African homeland. Reading the diary, she realizes her father was involved in radical politics and begins a quest to learn more about him--what she discovers is surprising and prompts her to visit the small nation in West Africa that is her ancestral homeland. In Africa, she has both good and bad experiences with her father and two of his other children and confronts questions about her identity and what it means to be part of the African diaspora. Some of her African experiences were nightmarish, and I had trouble reconciling how she turned them into emotional growth (perhaps because they were being read by an older white woman completely divorced from her ancestral homelands) but I felt the exploration of Anna's search for identity was well-done and I benefited from reading Sankofa (which means to go back and get).
Mysteries/Thrillers
I'm not much for "cozy" mysteries, but I do like food, so I picked up Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia Manansala. I did enjoy the descriptions of Filipino food, about which I know nothing, but wasn't too keen on the mystery, which involved the death of a restaurant critic in the main character's family restaurant, an extortion scheme, drug-dealing, and a lot of other crazy details. If this becomes a series, I doubt I will pick up the next title--especially because it's set in a small Illinois town where, I am sure, there couldn't be enough murders to sustain a series!
The last few Lucas Davenport mysteries by John Sandford had made Lucas seem more like a vigilante than a law enforcement officer, so I was glad to see that the officer had switched focus to Lucas's daughter Letty in The Investigator, undoubtedly the first in a new series. Sadly, I was not much enamored of the book. It had an interesting domestic terrorism plot at its core (almost made me worry that a terrorist might read the book and find it a good idea) but the character development was lame, even for a mystery, and Letty is already a little too willing to kill.
Nonfiction
I hadn't planned to read any more books about Trump, but I was looking for an audio book to check out of the library and Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa popped up, so . . . Not all that much new or unexpected about Trump; he was perhaps even crazier and more rage-filled than I had previously realized--sadly, I got no insight into why people continued to work for him when he threatened democracy and abused his staff. Woodward and Costa clearly believe we owe much to General Mark Milley in terms of surviving 2020-21. One of the oddest anecdotes in the book is about Biden. President Biden and Senator Susan Collins were on the phone; Biden was trying to convince Collins to support his initial COVID relief package. All of a sudden someone (I can’t remember exactly what staff member it was) says “I just wanted to let you know I’m on this call, too.” Then they heard a couple of other pings meaning other staff members were getting on the call. Biden hadn’t asked them to be on the call and he didn’t know the first guy was on there. Woodward never explained how that happened, whether staff regularly monitor Biden’s calls without telling him or what. I know staff are on many calls for “documentation” purposes but this was clearly a political call so why would they feel they needed to be on there if not asked?
Favorite Passages:
Without a story, it's all just information.
Jennifer Egan
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